Wikibooks:Neutral point of view

This page documents an official Wikibooks policy that the Wikibooks community has accepted and Wikibookians must follow. Except for minor edits, please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy.

Note: This policy does not apply to talk pages, user pages, project pages, MediaWiki pages, and any subpages thereof.

Wikibooks has a strict neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. Wikibooks is best served by trying to present a fair, neutral description of the facts—among which are the facts that various interpretations and points of view exist (of course, there are limits to what POVs are considered worth mentioning, which can be an area of conflict).

Wikibooks is not served by advancing or detracting particular points of view on any given subject. Consequently, books written from a neutral point of view represent differing views on a subject fairly within the book's scope (in other words, if the scope is mainstream views of physics, than competing mainstream views can and should be presented, but non-mainstream views are almost always irrelevant).

"Neutral point of view" should not be confused with "point of view espoused by an international body such as the United Nations"; writing in NPOV style requires recognizing that even widely held or widely respected points of view are not necessarily all-encompassing.

While NPOV is an ultimate goal in writing books, NPOV is difficult to achieve immediately as a single writer, and is thus sometimes regarded as an iterative process (as is wiki writing in general), by which opposing viewpoints compromise on language and presentation to produce a neutral description acceptable to all.

This might be viewed as an adversarial system, but hopefully a polite one. People are expected to approximate NPOV to the best of their ability and welcome improvements brought by others in good faith; a failure of the system can become an edit war, in which two or more parties dig in and refuse to compromise, instead reverting each other's changes outright.